The
2000 election and Bush's attack on democratic
rightsNews
and Analysis: North America
by Barry Gray
Copyright: World
Socialist Website November 14, 2001

Reprinted
in partOne
year ago the American ruling elite broke in a
fundamental and irrevocable manner with democratic
norms and procedures. For the first time in US
history, Where is the it decided the result of
a national election by Bush suppressing votes
and overriding the will of the administration
electorate.

The Democratic candidate, Al Gore, won the popular
vote nationally by some 600,000 votes, but Election
Day ended with neither candidate holding a majority
of the electoral votes, and the result in the
pivotal state of Florida in dispute. (Under the
archaic system established by America's founding
fathers, the presidential race is not decided
by the popular vote. The president is actually
chosen by electors from the various states. The
number of a state's electors is equal to the number
of its representatives in the House of Representatives
plus two-the number of senators from each state.)

Had the votes in Florida been counted in a fair
and impartial manner, Gore would have won that
state and its 25 electoral votes, and been declared
the next president. That, however, is not what
happened. Instead, the votes of thousands of Floridians
were suppressed and, by means of fraud and conspiracy,
the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, was
installed in the White House.

Future
generations will look back on the election of
2000 as the definitive point at which the American
ruling class embarked on the road to dictatorship.
All of the authoritarian impulses that have assumed
such ominous and concrete forms since September
11 were already revealed in the methods employed
by the Bush campaign and the Republican Party
to effect an electoral coup d'état.

Nine
days before the US Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision,
stopped the counting of disputed votes in the
pivotal state of Florida, thereby handing the
election to Bush, the chairman of the World Socialist
Web Site editorial board, David North, summed
up the basic issues in the election crisis in
a report to a public meeting in Sydney, Australia.
[Lessons from history: the 2000 elections and
the new "irrepressible conflict"] North said:

"What the decision of this court will reveal is
how far the American ruling class is prepared
to go in breaking with traditional bourgeois-democratic
and constitutional norms. Is it prepared to sanction
ballot fraud and the suppression of votes and
install in the White House a candidate who has
attained that office through blatantly illegal
and anti-democratic methods?"

On December 12, 2000 the US Supreme Court did
precisely that. Five right-wing Republican justices,
unelected and unanswerable to the American people,
handed down a decision reeking with contempt for
democratic rights and devoid of any legal or constitutional
scruples. This was a court whose majority had
employed the mantras of "states' rights" and "judicial
restraint" to curtail the power of the federal
government to enforce laws protecting the rights
of workers and minorities. But when the issue
was posed: what considerations would guide the
resolution of the contested election in Florida-the
need to determine the will of the electorate,
or the desire of the most right-wing sections
of the ruling elite to install its man in the
White House-the Supreme Court inserted itself
into the internal affairs of Florida and took
the extraordinary action of overriding the state's
highest court.

The Florida Supreme Court had overruled the attempt
of the state's Republican administration, headed
by Governor Jeb Bush, to certify George W. Bush,
the governor's brother, as the winner of the presidential
race on the basis of a margin of a few hundred
votes. Republican election officials had secured
Bush's margin by blocking or disregarding hand
counts of thousands of ballots that had not registered
a presidential preference in the machine tabulations.
(Such hand counts are stipulated in the law of
Florida and most other states as the means for
resolving contested elections.) The Florida high
court demanded that the uncounted ballots be counted.

In taking this action, the Florida justices invoked
the basic democratic principles of popular sovereignty
and the right to vote. They asserted, "The right
of suffrage is the pre-eminent right contained
in the [Florida] Declaration of Rights, for without
this basic freedom all others would be diminished."

Antonin
Scalia, the ideological spokesman for the extreme
right-wing faction on the US Supreme Court, excoriated
the Florida court for raising these democratic
principles. On the basis of a reactionary interpretation
of the US Constitution, one that flies in the
face of constitutional jurisprudence since the
Civil War, he declared that American citizens
had no constitutional right to vote for the president
of the United States. This explicit repudiation
of the right to vote became the anchor for the
December 12 decision that installed George W.
Bush in the White House by discarding the votes
of thousands of Floridians.

The following day, Democratic candidate Al Gore
delivered a craven concession speech, equating
the court's attack on the right to vote with "the
rule of law" and calling on all Americans to rally
behind the "president-elect."

Two
months later, in a report to an international
school in Sydney, WSWS editorial board member
Barry Grey drew the following balance sheet on
the 2000 election: ["The world historical implications
of the political crisis in the United States"]

"The 2000 election in the United States is a historical
watershed. It marks an irrevocable break with
the forms and traditions of American democracy....
Notwithstanding the attempts of the media and
the political establishment-liberal no less than
conservative-to pass over the events of November
and December 2000 and move on,' as though nothing
of great significance had occurred, America has
been changed in a fundamental way, and nothing
will ever be the same in the United States, or,
for that matter, the world."

Grey went on to say: "The United States has not
been transformed into a dictatorship. But its
ruling elite has embarked on a course that must
lead either to authoritarian rule of a fascist
type, or social revolution."

Fair
Use Notice: This site contains copyrighted material
the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding
of environmental, political, economic, democratic, domestic and international
issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted
material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without
profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own
that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.